Paper to appear in:Proceedings of the Berkeley Conference on Women and Language, April 94

cherny@csli.stanford.edu

Gender Differences in Text-Based Virtual Reality

Lynn Cherny
Linguistics Department
Stanford University

Electronic communication has been claimed to be a medium that allows
more equitable gender communication, in the absence of physical and social
status cues (Graddol and Swann 1989). Furthermore, computer-mediated
communication has been argued to be ``anarchic,'' lacking in
established conventions of use (Ferrera et al. 1991), resulting in
a breakdown of traditional hierarchical differences in communication.
In contrast, Herring (1993) presents results about activity on email lists that
illustrate that men still dominate the discourse and choice of topic,
as well as exhibiting a more adversarial rhetorical style.

Curious as to whether gender differences of more subtle sorts are
carried into cyberspace, I took a look at gendered behavior in a text-based
virtual reality, or MUD (multi-user dimension), in which I am a
participant-observer. For roughly three
months, I recorded interactions that I witnessed between male and
female-identified characters. I found that indeed there are
differences in how men interact versus how women
interact: men use more physically violent imagery during conversation,
and women are
more physically affectionate towards other characters than men are.

A MUD is a text-based virtual reality, offering users access to
a virtual landscape and other simultaneously connected users.
In this paper I will discuss a variety of MUD called a MOO,
or ``MUD, Object Oriented'' (Curtis and Nichols 1993).
Text descriptions tell users what they see as they move around the
virtual environment, which may be modeled after a house, a
town, even another planet. Users interact with the environment and
one other via characters, which have names, genders, and descriptions
determined by each user.

For instance,
if I type the command to look at a character, I see her description,
as shown in A:

<<Example A.>>
A short woman in a black dress who wishes she were reading something trashy
everytime she opens an academic journal. Her shadow is in the shape of an
unfinished dissertation right now.
She is awake and looks alert.

These are the two primary modes of communicating in the MOO. A character
may either say something directly (with a double-quote, as in the
first example) or ``emote''
(with a colon) to narrate thoughts or actions. (In Examples B-F,
the ``>'' (right arrow) indicates the line that I
typed in the MOO buffer, and below it is what I and other characters
saw after the MOO interpreted the command.)

<<Example B.>>
>"hi
lynn says, "hi"
<<Example C.>>
>:sits down for a rest.
lynn sits down for a rest.
<<Example D.>>
>:wonders how old Puff is.
lynn wonders how old Puff is.

Other useful communication options include the possibility of
directing speech to or paging another character. A page results in a private
communication only visible to a particular player, not visible to anyone
else in the room (Example F).
Any other character in the same room as the ``speaker'' can see
directed speech (Example E).

<<Example E.>>
>`jpd how are you?
lynn [to jpd]: how are you?
<<Example F.>>
>page jpd how did you get a connection?
Your message has been sent to jpd.

The users of some MOOs experiment with gender a lot: many
take on neuter characters or switch their declared gender regularly.
Given the
difficulties of tracking gender differences in such an environment, I
based most of my conclusions on interactions in JaysHouseMOO (JHM), where
a small set of people interact frequently, many of whom know one another
``in real life'' (abbreviated ``IRL'' in the MOO) and who don't
switch gender.
Most of the regulars in the MOO have been using the medium for
at least a year, so they are quite ``socialized'' in its use.
[Footnote: The notion of socialization is one often-discussed by
the characters themselves; the influx of thousands of new characters
in a short time period on LambdaMOO, which my friends also maintain
some contact with, has caused a lot of reflection on the topic
of ``mature use of the medium.'']

The gender breakdown on JHM is roughly 3/4 regularly active male characters and
1/4 regularly active female characters. It is not possible to get accurate
comparative statistics on character activity because characters
may be present in a virtual room with other characters but not
attending to the conversation. (Many users are connected from offices
or while working at school, with a MOO window beside a work window,
and are therefore subject to distractions in the real world.) As a result,
my numbers in the following sections are really only suggestive of
trends at best. [Footnote: To protect my sources, I have changed all the names in
my examples.]

In many ways, the interactions in the MOO are highly conventionalized,
unlike Ferrera et al's (1991) claims about interactive written discourse on
the computer. Not only do the users of the medium make use of many
acronyms and abbreviations, but certain behaviors have evolved as well
that facilitate communication in the narrow bandwidth of the text
medium and add to a sense of community. In this paper, I will
bypass many interesting
questions about the structure of discourse in this medium and just focus
on the roles and frequency of certain ``physical'' activities in
the discourse. Hopefully the gist of the examples will be clear, if
not every detail. (It should be noted that the group of MOOers I
discuss here have developed their own unique style of interaction over
time.)

When a character enters a virtual room, frequently other characters greet
her with a wave or a hug, or even a ``whuggle.'' A ``whuggle'' is a purely
virtual interaction which is related to a hug.
A new character on JHM had it explained to him in the discourse in
Example G:[Footnote: I have cut some irrelevant lines in many of my examples.]

Hugs and whuggles occur mainly during greetings but also during
other interactions, often as a sign of affection or support.
In one case, after a woman had to kick an annoying
character off the MOO,
another woman hugged her supportively and she returned the hug. There's another
such case in Example I:[Footnote:The verb ``spam'' means roughly ``fill up people's screens with garbage.'' This conversation occurred right after Shelley
told a very amusing, multi-line story about a bad experience she had had
while going home that night.]

Although whuggling can involve inanimate objects and can be sarcastic,
it is taken seriously enough when interpersonal to be considered
offensive by one character
on the receiving end of a ``whuggle'' he does not want, as shown in
Example J:[Footnote: As I discuss later, a character may emote that she
has killed another one if she dislikes something the other character has
said or done. Ted probably repeats his whuggle in J just to be extra annoying.]

(``LM'' and ``lmoo'' refer to LambdaMOO, and a morph is like a secondary character owned
by the original character. ``Eir'' is a third person possessive gender
neutral pronoun used in the MOO.)

Several characters have argued that it is offensive to
be whuggled by people they don't know well. One
male whuggled by another male protested afterwards
that there should be a protocol for whuggling: a character carries a list
of acceptable whugglers, and if she is whuggled by one of them, then
the result is a mutual whuggle event, i.e., X and Y whuggle.

The Good Manners guide, which characters can see by typing ``help manners'' in the MOO,
proscribes random hugging (and other overly familiar behavior), shown in
Example L:

<<Example L.>> From Help Manners:
Behavior that would be rude 'face-to-face' is rude here, too.
It isn't reasonable to ':kiss' or ':hug' folks you don't know.

It would be overly simplistic, however, to assume that the standards of real life
interactions apply transparently in virtual reality; the existence of
a purely virtual interaction like ``whuggling'' is enough to debunk that notion.
Lots of behavior involves a fantastical component, as the following
examples under M illustrate:

<<Example M.>>
Ellen swings her Ellenaxe at the couch, the large-scale projects whiteboard,
and the conference hall lobby.
****
Bryan accidentally sets fire to Mike.
****
Ray takes off and nukes LambdaMOO from orbit. "It's the only way to be sure."

Despite the grassroots movement against whuggling and hugging randomly,
hugs do occur between characters who don't know each other IRL, and it
is not always viewed as offensive. The etiquette involved seems to require that
both parties feel affectionately toward one another.
Example N illustrates that ``help manners'' may be
intentionally disregarded:

<<Example N.>>
1 Marion would hug Jon if it weren't against Help-Manners.
2 Marion strangles help manners and hugs Jon, whom she doesn't know
from Adam.

I counted whuggles and hugs in 2 months of my logs, and found
the distribution by gender shown under Example O:

In this chart, M-M means ``male whuggles or hugs male'' and M-T means
``male whuggles or hugs Thing.''
Clearly men hug and whuggle women more often than they do other men,
a fact which supports Marie's conclusion that Patrick whuggled her simply
because she is female.

One of the male-male hugs occurred in the context of my having asked why so few
men hug in VR, two of the others occurred in the context of Marion questioning
the Manners listing about not hugging people you don't know. The other
four hugs were all perpetrated by one man, apparently seriously (in
at least two cases, he hadn't seen the person he hugged in a long time).
However, the response he got was not always positive: e.g., one recipient said,
``hug me again and I'll rip your face off.''
Several of the male-male whuggles were meant to annoy, as in the case under
Example J above.

The large number of hugs/whuggles initiated by female characters
is particularly striking considering the proportions of male and
female characters in the MOO. There are 200 male-initiated hug or
whuggle events versus 225 female-initiated events. Given the disparity
of 3/4 men to 1/4 women, a hug/whuggle event is almost 4 times as
likely to be initiated by a female character.

Women are three times as likely to whuggle men as they are to hug them,
but they are equally likely to hug as to whuggle other women. Why?
It may be that the whuggle is seen as a ``safe'' form of affection
in the MOO, while a hug has real-life significance.
Men get whuggled, therefore, rather than hugged;
other women,``safer'' objects of affection who won't ``take it the wrong
way,'' can receive hugs.

The fact that Things don't get hugged at all supports the distinction made
between
hugging and whuggling in the explanation to Buddy in Example G above.
Why women whuggle
Things so much less often than men do is a tantalizing question. Perhaps
women categorize ``whuggling'' as an action serving a social function
rather than expressing an attitude towards an external object.

Aside from the hugging and whuggling, there is a
lot of emoted physical interaction between characters, which is
particularly interesting when analyzed
against the backdrop of hugging/whuggling patterns.
Because sifting
through 3 months of transcripts by hand was practically impossible,
I wrote shell scripts to extract emoted stuff and sorted through 19 days picked
at random. I counted all cases of characters emoting that they were
doing anything to another character, totalled in the row labelled Total
in the chart under P. [Footnote: This list does not include common non-physical modes of interaction, like
``jill eyes Mike warily.'']

I then broke this Total
down into common types of emoted action. [Footnote: See the Appendix for a terse listing
of verbs included in each category.]

In the chart, M-X
denotes all cases of males emoting actions aimed at either all characters
in the room (regardless of gender) or guests. Otherwise, the column
labelled F-M,
for instance, denotes cases of female characters emoting physical
actions directed at male characters.

Admittedly the categorization of emotes was a subjective process, based
on my interpretation of each one's role in context and the action
itself. My discussion of the categorization follows.

Affectionate behavior included
``patting,'' ``high5ing,'' ``kissing,'' ``tickling,'' ``nuzzling,'' among
others, but not whuggling or hugging (because those were counted separately).
Affectionate actions are actions I considered to be at least
superficially non-aggressive and apparently affectionate.
They seemed to be meant well for the most part, but in a few cases
the action might have been intended as provocative,
as we saw with some of the M-M whuggles and hugs above: e.g.,
Rob kisses Nat chastely. Interestingly,
there were a few cases of ``made up''
verbs used in this category (all involving one woman), shown in Q:

Most of the actions in the Affectionate category
consisted of ``patting'' or ``high5ing''. Male
characters initiated ``high5ing'' (to congratulate, sometimes possibly
sarcastic), and both male and female characters patted male
characters, either in reassurance or congratulation. Interestingly,
aside from possibly the cases above in Q, most of the affectionate
interaction doesn't appear flirtatious, while other sorts of physical
interactions described below might be considered flirtatious.

In Neutral behavior I included ``sitting on,'' ``tagging,''
``shaking hands.'' The things classified as Neutral were usually
context-specific non-violent actions (like ``shaking hands''), or else one of the non-aggressive conventional jokes
involving other characters, like: Ray spraypaints "WAKE UP" on Diane in dayglo orange. The items I classified as Neutral play
numerous roles in the discourse (as do many of the other types of
emotes in the chart): a character shook someone's hand
in congratulations,
for instance; and several characters randomly sat on another one
when he walked into the room, perhaps as a way of acknowledging
his arrival.

Pokes were instances of one character poking another one,
e.g., jill pokes Tom.Pokes are frequently used to get another character's attention, when
that character is not active in the conversation. As such, they tend
to occur out of the blue, without contextual priming. For instance, if
Karen is inactive and Tom wants her to participate in the conversation,
he might give her a poke. If she is watching her MOO window, she may
choose to respond.

Killings were cases of a character
emoting that she killed another one, e.g., Marie kills Shawn.Killing of other characters is a ritual behavior that originates
in gaming MUDs, where characters can be killed by
monsters or other characters. In MOO, if character X emotes that she
kills character Y, this usually signifies that X strongly disapproves
of something that Y has done or said. (Nothing actually
happens to the character ``killed,'' she is still present and able
to participate in the conversation.) ``Killing'' is treated more or
less seriously by different characters; in my counts, certain characters
were responsible for most of the killing. All of the F-M
killings were perpetrated by one woman. I was responsible for the one
F-F killing (the object wasn't in the room at the time, but had
said something to another female character that really annoyed me; interestingly,
I was censured for this by a male character, but given the tension in
the situation, it was perhaps appropriate to avoid silliness). Three
out of five of the M-F killings were perpetrated by one male,
on different females. Seven of the M-M killings were done by
one male. Examples of killings are shown under Examples R, S, T.
[Footnote: ``Killing'' is parallel to whuggling in some interesting ways: characters
may ``kill'' things just as they may whuggle things.
In my three months of data, females killed things 6 times,
killed males 9 times, killed females 3 times. Males killed things 16 times,
killed females 13 times, and killed other males 57 times.]

In general, it appears to me that men seem to view killing as
joking criticism, and at least one woman views it
as expression of more serious criticism. There aren't enough cases in
the 19 days I singled out for me to be
sure about intentions, though; and since most women
don't do it at all, it's tough to conclude anything about how women use it.

The Consuming category contains all cases of a character
``licking,'' ``biting,'' ``eating,'' or
``snacking on'' another character.
Consuming characters seems to be a recurrent theme, often in
response to mention of food in the MOO (one visitor recently suggested
that JaysHouseMOO be renamed FoodMOO, since food is such a common theme).
Generally ``biting'' and ``licking''
seem to be just mild teasing, possibly flirtatious. There are
nearly as many M-M cases as F-M cases, which may mean
that the notion of ``flirtation'' has to be widened a bit (another possibility
is that the actions mean different things in different gender contexts).
[Footnote: Most of
the men in the MOO are heterosexual or bisexual; I don't know of any
gay men there. Likewise there are a few bisexual women, but no out lesbians.]
Notice below in Example U that Carl smiles after he is bitten by Henry,
from which we might conclude that the biting was not taken as criticism, but as
teasing:

The case in Example V is probably an example of a bite being used as a poke
would be used normally; Harry comes into the room and bites
Jeani immediately. He then pokes her a little later,
in a more explicit effort to get her attention, followed by a little burning
and killing. Harry is clearly criticizing her, and she is largely ignoring
his physical emotes; she also sounds likes she doesn't recognize what she
has done to annoy him (explained in line 16 finally).

In fact, Example V illustrates
the difficulty in classifying the use of different emoted actions;
their role in the discourse may have less to do with their
imagery content and much more to do with placement relative to
other items in the discourse.

Types of things in the Other category include ritual
jokes like those in W:[Footnote: These are ``ritual'' because they are encoded
in commands that allow players to emote them by simply typing the command
and the ``object''-usually another character-they are directing the
action at. E.g., if I type ``thwap Damon,'' everyone sees lynn thwaps Damon, and without
any silly feature.]

<<Example W.>>
Ted runs atta Damon
*******
Mike thrashes you and pummels you severely in a very British manner.
*******
Henry thwaps Mike, and without any silly feature.
*******
Shelley accidentally sets fire to Harry.
*******
Ted shakes Parker.
*******
Ted dips Conner in gasoline and ignites the result. WHOOF!
*******
Kit grabs hold of Henry and stuffs him into the dictionary.

as well as more context-driven jokes that seemed more ``physically'' consequential (in their imagery)
than what I classed as Neutral. Examples are in X and Y:

It is interesting to note that the Other category contains
the largest percentage of the physical emotes in all columns. This may
in part be due to the relative ease of executing the ``ritual'' commands.
However, in the M-M and M-F cases, it is nearly half
the total emotes counted, while in the F-M case, it is just
a third (with Neutral emotes being a larger percentage, almost a
quarter of the total, than in M-M or M-F interactions).

So, why all the violent or physically aggressive imagery? It must be
said from the outset
that based on my observations,
actual serious disputes between characters happen in quotes, not emotes.
Characters don't ``stage'' fights with the various violent imagery available
in MOO verbs (i.e., the ``ritual'' forms I mentioned),
nor do they ``ad lib'' violence. The violent imagery that I counted
in the MOO is situated
within conversation between characters, often very playful conversation,
where emoted actions are as much speech acts as are direct quotes.
As we saw, some physical emotes serve particular purposes: hugs and
whuggles express affection, killing expresses criticism, pokes are
attempts to get someone's attention.
Other physical emotes, like biting or accidentally setting fire to
someone, may function in conversation frequently as a
form of attention-giving; a response that is phatic, rather than
contentful, and says ``I'm participating,'' and possibly ``don't ignore
me.''

As I showed, not all emoted actions are acceptable however; hugs and
whuggles must be negotiated. It strikes me as amusing that
violent imagery is okay (while it may actually be somewhat disturbing to some
people, I don't have any cases recorded of anyone asking anyone to
stop setting fire to another character, or stop cutting someone up into
little bloody pieces), but expression of affection is a sensitive issue
in the MOO. This is probably because many characters in the MOO are
highly sensitized to issues around sexism. A particularly
problematic case of sexist (and hostile) emoting is ``netrape,''
which is an often-discussed complaint on some MUDs (e.g., LambdaMOO).
The case described in Dibbell (1993) was upsetting enough that the
character responsible for the emoted actions was kicked off the
MOO (i.e., ``toaded''). Given the
concerns that some females have about netrape and harassment,
it seems plain that cyberspace is not free of abusive or hierarchical
behavior (contra Graddol and Swann 1989).

Example Z (amusingly) shows
some female characters discussing explicit sexual harassment
and pointing out that on this MOO (JHM) it is not allowed. Notice that most
of the men
are joking around in the ``background'' harassing one another, rather
than adding to the conversation contentfully (aside from Jon in
line 11).

<<Example Z.>>
1 jill recalls some friend telling her people get raped on Lambda...
[..]
2 Sandy [to jill]: People can get netraped on any system, not just Lambda. It's
bad to associate that characteristic to one place.
3 jill [to Sandy]: sure, it's just that's the first thing I heard about Lambda.
4 Karen nodsnods Sandy. "Although different places do have different
attitudes towards harassment."
5 Sandy [to jill]: It happens considerably less on lambda than on most places.
6 Tanya thinks harassment is much less tolerated here
7 Henry harasses Tanya!
8 jill wonders what happens to harassers (and can't find her dictionary).
9 Sandy [to jill]: Here and OpalMOO will toad you for even STARTING to be
sexually abusive...or abusive at all.
10 Bryan harasses Henry for no apparent reason.
11 Jon sure doesn't tolerate it (or like it, at least)
12 Carl hair-asses Carl
13 Carl ouches
14 Karen nodsnods Tanya.
15 Jon eyes Carl warily.
16 jill is glad to hear this, "thanks, Sandy."

Although ``bodies'' in text-based VR are merely disembodied elements in larger
speech events between
characters, fleetingly mentioned as objects of burning or biting or
whuggling, there are clear gender differences in the use of
references to those bodies.
Women hug
and whuggle one another, but don't interact physically in many other ways.

It may be worth pointing out that most of the female-female conversations
on the MOO occur either with an audience of male characters, or in private
pages; private paged conversations are by far the norm, in fact. Since
page conversations are limited to 2 participants, a party atmosphere
can't develop, which happens in larger groups and often leads to
lots of emoted physical jokes. Women are quite capable of joining
in on the multi-party jokes; however, they usually aim the physical emotes
at male characters.

I speculate that women's use of physically aggressive emotes with male
characters is an example of women adapting to the different discourse
style in male-dominated groups (cf. Goodwin 1990). Women on the whole seem to
prefer using less violent imagery than men use (hence the Neutral
category being larger and the Other category smaller in
the F-M column than in the male-initiated
columns in P). [Footnote:My own response to ``killing'' for instance, is
rather negative-I find it somewhat nasty. Several men I have talked
to about ``killing'' said that they don't find it nasty at all!]
It is probable that physical emotes have different significance in different
gender contexts; one woman, for instance, who was the target of a violent
emote originating from another woman, paged me and asked me privately
what she had done to deserve it... which at least suggests that the
interaction was marked in some way.
There are certainly individual differences (such as
men who don't use violent imagery at all and women who use more than
other women) but the overall pattern is nevertheless suggestive.

I obviously owe a big debt to the people in JHM for making this paper possible, and a mere footnote hardly seems sufficient. Many thanks also to people who gave me comments and/or talked to me about this stuff in more detail, both in the MOO and irl: Judy Anderson, Jeff Blaine, Paul Dourish, Michele Evard, Tari Fanderclai, Charlotte Linde, Larry Masinter, Doug Orleans, Erik Ostrom, Rebecca Spainhower, Tom Wasow. Special thanks to Jennifer Grace for a conversation on MediaMOO in fall of 1993 which planted the seed for the idea of looking at physical interactions between characters for gender differences.